Harald Hardrada (2 page)

It was that observation which first suggested Harald Hardrada to me as the subject for a military biography, most especially because of its use of the term ‘professional soldier'. While there are warrior kings aplenty throughout the history of the early medieval period, and not least in the northern world, Harald can be said to stand almost, if not entirely, alone among them in having spent all the years of his young manhood on active service as a professional soldier – and, quite specifically, in the modern understanding of the term.

Within a year of his escape from the field of Stiklestad, he had crossed the Baltic and found his way into Russia where he reappears among the Scandinavian mercenary fighting-men employed by the Russian princes to whom they were known as
Varjazi
or ‘Varangians'. In that capacity and apparently as a junior officer, he is known to have taken part in a major campaign against the Poles, but assuredly also came up against the subject peoples of the northern forests and the steppe warriors to the south along the Dnieper. Some three years later he arrived in Constantinople, not yet twenty years old but already a battle-hardened commander of his own warrior company, to enter imperial service with the Varangian mercenaries of Byzantium.

During nine years of service under three emperors, Harald saw action at sea in the Mediterranean against Saracen corsairs and on land against their shore bases in Asia Minor, led his troop on escort duty to the Holy Land and took part in the Byzantine invasion of Arab-held Sicily, before being despatched against rebellions in the south of Italy and in Bulgaria. His accomplishments in the Sicilian and Bulgarian campaigns earned him promotion to the emperor's personal Varangian bodyguard in Constantinople where he was almost unavoidably – although very probably not innocently – caught up in the whirlpool of Byzantine politics. Subsequently falling from imperial favour, he was briefly imprisoned before escaping in time to play his own grisly part in the downfall of an emperor amid the bloodiest day of rioting ever seen in the city. Shortly afterwards Harald's ambitions turned back towards his homeland and, despite having been refused imperial permission of leave, he launched his ships in a daring departure from Constantinople to begin the long journey north.

From the Black Sea he made his way up the Dnieper and back into Russia, assuredly bringing military intelligence to the Grand Prince in Kiev whose daughter he was to marry before moving north to assemble the great wealth he had acquired in the east and is said to have sent on to Novgorod for safe-keeping. So it was that Harald provided himself with the personal treasury which was later to assume legendary proportions in the hands of the saga-makers but still must have been more than sufficient to fund the force of ships and fighting-men that he would need to challenge his nephew Magnus' sovereignty over Norway and Denmark. By the spring of 1046 he was back in Scandinavia, forging a short-lived alliance with the claimant to Danish kingship and raiding around Denmark on a campaign of intimidation. Before the end of the year, the Danish ally had been discarded and the nephew had accepted his uncle into an uneasy joint kingship, which was to extend only until the following autumn when the sudden death of Magnus left Harald in sole possession of the Norwegian kingdom.

Thus, within less than eighteen months of his return from the east, the professional soldier had emerged in his perhaps more familiar guise of warrior king, and one whose reign was to be almost entirely taken up with conflict – seventeen years of sporadic war on the Danes, interspersed with bitter suppression of recalcitrant Norwegian factions and their Swedish allies, leading finally to the doomed invasion of England – all in seemingly voracious pursuit of dominion, vengeance and conquest.

Even that drastically abbreviated synopsis can leave scarcely any doubt of Harald Hardrada's potential as the subject of a military biography. Indeed, it might be thought to preclude the possibility of any account of his life not dominated by warfaring, and yet the approach to be taken here will still be at some degree of variance from the customary biographical format. While, of course, it will seek to offer a realistic portrait of the man himself – and of other remarkable individuals who played influential roles in his story – its first intention will be a reconstruction in some detail of the extraordinary military career by which he acquired his awesome reputation. Beyond that central concept, however, there lies a broader scope of interest, because to trace the course of Harald's warrior's way would seem to offer an exceptional, even unique, opportunity for exploration of the wide spectrum of warrior cultures – from Bulgar rebels to Norman mercenaries and Pecheneg steppe warriors to Anglo-Saxon housecarls – which he encountered across the greater extent of Scandinavian expansion at its high peak in the first half of the eleventh century.

From that perspective, Harald's mercenary soldiering in the east might be seen as an especially fitting education for a man said to have wanted to become a warlord since infancy. If the teenage years in Russia can be taken to represent a privileged apprenticeship and the wide-ranging experience in Byzantine service his time as a journeyman, taken together they assuredly informed, and in some measure shaped, his return to the northland as a warrior king. Thus the subject and structure of this book are also intended as ‘the life and career of a professional soldier . . . beginning with a battle, the battle of Stiklestad . . . and ending in battle, thirty-six years later at Stamford Bridge', and so Snorri Sturluson's version of Harald's saga would seem to offer itself as my first choice of working template. Such a choice, however, raises all the scholarly doubt as to whether a saga set down in Iceland some two hundred years after the events it describes can be taken as reliable historical evidence for an eleventh-century Norwegian king. There was a time, even as recently as the earlier decades of the twentieth century, when the
konunga sögur
(or ‘kings' sagas') – and especially those forming Snorri's
Heimskringla
cycle – were accorded all the respect due to impeccable sources of historical record, but modern scholarship has cast so much doubt on their reliability as to greatly diminish the esteem in which they were formerly held.

The historian's raw material for an understanding of the past is its surviving written record, so the first measure of any document's historical value must usually be its proximity in time and place to the events it describes, and yet in the case of Harald Hardrada the most closely contemporary documentary record cannot be considered any better than uneven. While his invasion of England is properly entered in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
for 1066, his earlier presence in Russia would seem to have entirely escaped the notice of the Kievan monks who were setting down the annals now known as the
Russian Primary Chronicle
within a decade of his death, and yet his service with the Varangians of Byzantium is fully confirmed by a generous notice in a Byzantine document dated to the last quarter of the eleventh century.

As to the early sources originating in the Scandinavian and Baltic world, the most closely contemporary is the work of a German churchman, Adam of Bremen, whose
History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen
was written in Latin and completed by 1075. Adam's account of Harald, while hardly much better than fragmentary, is almost unrelentingly hostile, and understandably so when its author had derived so much of his information by way of personal contact with Harald's discarded Danish ally and subsequent lifelong enemy, Svein Estridsson. Nonetheless, Adam of Bremen does offer his own acknowledgement of Harald's warlike reputation when he refers to him as the ‘thunderbolt of the north' and, on occasion, can also supply interesting detail to be found in no other source.

The earliest history actually written by a Scandinavian does not appear until at least a hundred years after that of Adam of Bremen from whose work its author, known as Saxo Grammaticus, evidently borrowed material. Saxo's
Gesta Danorum
(or ‘Acts of the Danes') is another Latin history, although one more probably written by a lay clerk than a monk, because Saxo was of a Danish warrior family, a background which may well account for the unswerving loyalty he shows to Svein Estridsson; it would also account for the rather different light he might be thought to throw upon the saga record of warfare between Svein and Harald. The first historian of the Norwegian kings generally believed to have been himself a Norwegian was a contemporary of Saxo known only as ‘Theodoric the Monk' whose Latin
Historia
, written around the year 1180, is dedicated to the archbishop of Nidaros (now Trondheim). It is a work which shows extremely scant respect for Norway's royal house and is thus thought likely to have provoked the ruling Norwegian king Sverri Sigurdsson, himself the subject and patron of the first saga set down in writing, to encourage the composition of a history more sympathetic to his ancestors and one which would serve as a counter to Theodoric's
Historia
.

This was to become the work now known as
Ágrip
or ‘Summary', an abbreviation of
Ágrip af Nóregs konunga-sögum
(‘Summary of the sagas of the Norwegian kings'), a title applied only in the last few centuries, and which reflects the incomplete state of the sole surviving manuscript copy while doing less than justice to the landmark significance of the long-lost original. Probably composed as early as the 1190s, and by an Icelander living in Norway, Ágrip is the oldest surviving history of Norwegian kings written in the Old Norse vernacular and was extensively used as a source by saga-makers in the thirteenth century, although they were certainly working from a fuller and better text than that preserved in the surviving manuscript. Of no less importance here, though, is its anonymous author's use of material from the oral tradition to expand upon that found in the Latin histories, because it is just this approach which points the way, followed in subsequent decades by the authors of the more expansive saga histories – and especially those bearing on Harald Hardrada.

Variant versions of Harald's saga are found in the three oldest collections of
konunga-sögur
– the
Morkinskinna
, the
Fagrskinna
and
Heimskringla
– while another, sometimes known as the ‘Separate'
Harald's saga
, is found in a later manuscript volume known as the
Flateyjarbók
. Reference will be made to all of these saga sources throughout the following pages and so this might be a useful point at which to introduce them.

Of the four named above, only the
Flateyjarbók
survives as an original manuscript, the largest of all Icelandic parchments, of which the core was set down by two known Icelandic scribes in the later fourteenth century. A number of further folios, including the text of the ‘Separate'
Harald's saga
, had been added by an unknown hand when it reappeared in a later ownership on the island of Flatey (hence its name, meaning ‘The Book of Flatey') in the second half of the fifteenth century. The three earlier saga collections have all been dated to the first few decades of the thirteenth century, even though none survive as original manuscripts but only as copies of various dates and in no less various conditions.

The collection called
Morkinskinna
(‘mouldy vellum') was written around the year 1275 by Icelandic scribes reworking an older text – now lost, but referred to as the ‘Oldest
Morkinskinna
' – which has been dated to at least fifty years earlier, with one scholarly estimate even placing its composition as precisely as the period 1217–22. It was this original text of
Morkinskinna
, containing sagas of the kings reigning between 1035 and the latter half of the twelfth century, which appears to have been the source of later sections in
Fagrskinna
and in
Heimskringla
and so might be taken to represent the earliest of the thirteenth-century collections unless, of course, all three were drawing upon an unknown common source.

Fagrskinna
(‘fair vellum') is a title applied through the last few hundred years to a work surviving only in copies deriving from an early thirteenth-century original which is thought to have been written earlier in Nidaros, or the surrounding Trondelag region, and probably by an Icelandic author. Apparently known in medieval times as
Nóregs konunga tal
(‘List of the Kings of Norway'), it is a collection of kings' sagas beginning in the ninth century with Halfdan the Black, father of Harald
hárfagri
(‘fair-hair'), and extending to the year 1177, which was probably also the terminal point of the original
Morkinskinna
as it certainly was of the third
konunga sögur
collection – and the one of first importance here – which is, of course, the
Heimskringla
attributed to Snorri Sturluson.

I have been using the cautious term ‘attributed to' in this context because there is no confirmation of the author's identity in any of the numerous medieval manuscripts of the work – most of them dating from the fourteenth century – even though the great weight of later evidence recognising him as Snorri Sturluson (and the total absence of any suggested rival claimant) puts the question almost entirely beyond doubt. Although there is no known original manuscript, there is one single leaf surviving from a copy set down before 1275 and believed to be the closest to Snorri's original on the evidence of its full text, which is preserved in at least three good transcripts. The title
Heimskringla
(‘the world's orb'), which is derived from the work's opening line (‘The orb of the world on which mankind dwells . . .') and has been applied since the seventeenth century, has a cosmic resonance well befitting the scope of its cycle of sixteen sagas extending from the mythic origins and legendary ancestry of the Norwegian royal house through to the last quarter of the twelfth century.